Moore’s Law: Why Enviros Are Wrong on Nuclear Power

Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore’s cheerleading for nuclear power is hardly news these days. But at a time when nuclear power is increasingly touted as a way to help meet growing energy demand and curb emissions of greenhouse gases at the same time, it’s always instructive to get a peek at the tug-of-war within the environmental movement over a carbon-free—but still controversial—source of power.

Unfortunately now the environmental movement is the primary obstacle here. If it weren’t for their opposition to nuclear energy, there would be a lot fewer coal-fired power plants in the United States and other parts of the world today.

Clearly, Mr. Moore’s message doesn’t always find a receptive audience; Germany and Italy have no plans to roll back their nuclear moratoriums despite the specter of more frequent blackouts. Environmentalists in the U.K. have sharply criticized the government’s plan to ramp up nuclear power production. In the U.S., concerns over storage of long-term nuclear waste, as well as licensing, technology, and cost issues, have all slowed down the nuclear revival.

But when Nicholas Stern, whose grim warnings of climate catastrophe are embraced by environmentalists, advocates the use of a lot more nuclear energy, it’s clearly a debate that still has plenty of legs.

Ken, thanks for the good information. I know very little about this subject other what I have read over the last couple of days. And I am not a scientist. I am concerned about water usage. Is there any information comparing water usage by the coal and nuclear power industries? And what happens to the water used? Can it be reclaimed?

2:08 pm May 14, 2008

Nick wrote :

regarding David's comment: "in 2007 Nuclear got 76% more federal Subsidy-per-MWh than Solar+Geothermal+Hydro+Wind.", I'd like to direct everyone's attention to the Energy Information Administration's study released in April 08 summarizing our subsidized energy. http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/servicerpt/subsidy2/index.html
In the executive summary, in table ES5, you can clearly see that Wind gets $23.37/MW-hr, solar gets $24.3/MW-hr, and nuclear gets $1.59/MW-hr in federal subsidies. I find the EIA hard to argue with on this matter. Please cite your 76% number, as it seems to me that it is an outright lie.

6:49 pm May 2, 2008

Maria Folsom wrote :

Ken, thank you for this intelligent and reasoned argument. You have educated and convinced me.

2:14 pm April 22, 2008

Ken wrote :

A little, I argued on many sites against the Bush Presidency, then the Iraq war and then its conduct, so called "intelligent design", and energy policy and nuclear power. Its the same quasi-religious mentality where people have a fear or a belief based on "faith" (I'm not sure if what it is based on measures up to the true, currently lost and/or trivialized meaning of that word) and will ignore all the evidence that contradicts their belief system and cherry pick anything, no matter what flimsy, snippets here and there and throw it up as support for their pre-conceived notion or article of faith. I'm not saying that I'm always right, I am, or hope that I am, susceptible to reason. I hope that I am because most of the people I debate on these issues don't appear to be and they all smell the same. They lack a capacity for critical thinking and ignore the greater evidence in favor of the weaker that supports their views. Here for example, nuclear power has been quietly and efficiently cranking out electricity for decades with little noise from the environmentalist (I would like to think of myself as one, but labels of any kind bother me). All the evidence is that nuclear is safer than coal by several orders of magnitude using every metric available. This is during their entire life cycles since you can sequester the waste from nuclear. Uranium and thorium are cheap and abundant and the technology for extracting energy is improving steadily.

Nuclear power and waste must be respected for what they are, not feared. Fear of dangerous things rarely leads to desired outcomes. The current administration uses fear to control the population, I think everyone can see how bad fear based outcomes can be without me explaining it (like I tried to six years ago).

Matt, look into Thorium Power's fuel design. I believe that Thorium is the fuel of the future. We didn't develop thorium based fuels for commercial reactors largely because we needed economies of scale for U235 production due to the cold war. The early engineers wanted to but there was no will to overcome the difficulties in getting it to work optimally. Now there should be.

About Environmental Capital

Environmental Capital provides daily news and analysis of the shifting energy and environmental landscape. The Wall Street Journal’s Keith Johnson is the lead writer. Environmental Capital is led by Journal energy reporter Russell Gold, and includes contributions from other writers at the Journal, WSJ.com, and Dow Jones Newswires. Write us at environmentalcapital@wsj.com.